It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their loads--making each time a little cloud of dust--and over the dump wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and iron that could later be sold to junk men. For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another, a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men--who in another age might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen--these futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.